WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body l...

Cities play a pivotal role in progressing cultural tourism, embracing everyday life, where particular cityscapes afford diversity of practices. The ethnographic storying two city public artworks presents backcloth historical, and religio-political outlooks. Public art idiosyncratic atmospherics provide conflicting narratives how pubic attends wider religion-tourism concerns. Both observe ‘toget...

This is a review of the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. Drawing upon research on Germans converting to Islam and Turks converting to Christianity, converting is understood as complex fusion of individual choice and cultural/political conflict.

Culture constrains individual choice, rendering certain actions impermissible or taboo. While cultural constraints may regulate behavior within a group, they can have a pernicious effect in multicultural societies, inhibiting the emergence of unified social conventions. We analyze interactions between members of two cultural groups who are matched to play a coordination game with an arbitrary n...

Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity Icon in Cultural Context, in The Trinity-Sergius Lavr in Russian History and Culture Readings in Russian Religious Culture, Deacon Vladimir Tsurikov, ed., vol. 3, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2006, 99-122.

Introduction This chapter considers social patterns that contribute to shaping the position of women in Arab societies today. It focuses on the impact of two central sources of influence: cultural and especially religious heritage and Arab intellectual production. Culture plays a pervasive role in composing the social context of women's position in the Arab world, and religious interpretations ...

Megachurches are some of the more enigmatic members of the contemporary religious market. Moreover, because of their substantial human and economic resources, they have been described in certain mainstream religious circles as indomitable forces that seem impervious to problems. Few academic studies consider how such churches experience and confront conflict particularly among Black megachurche...

1. Terminology and Basic Conception 2. The Traditional Concept of Translatio Studii 2.1. Translatio as a Cultural Figure 2.2. Political, Cultural and Religious Translatio 2.3. The Threefold Concept of Translatio Studii 2.4. Translatio Studii as Cultural Tradition 2.5. Translatio Studii as Cultural Transfer and Colonialism 2.6. Translatio Studii as a Shift of Hegemonic Culture 2.7. Symbolic Conf...